Ira Marcks

March 3. An eighty foot scrolling illustration slash music video for The Few Moments.

Cover Art 1: Ramones. Mashupping up.

The Long Shoreman and the Snake. Story and illustration by Ira Marcks. Read by Jess Fink.

Counting Sheep. An experimental music video for the song "Counting Sheep" by the pop/rock band, Great Mutations.

Draw Diary #1: M C Escher. MC Escher's drawings exists at the crossroads of math, science, and art. His compositions explore a world of riddles (how did a ceiling become a wall? how did a wall become a floor?) and visit places untethered from language, time, and memory. Most would expect to find an undefined world to be chaotic. He discovered a place of harmony that defies our interpretation.

Draw Diary #2: Anna Akhmatova. Anna Akhmatova was a poet during the Russian Revolution. In a time when many of her contemporaries fled, were jailed or executed, Anna did not seek refuge. Instead, she stayed to experience the repression and terror of a truly dark time in her country's history. She wrote poems through it all. History has the facts. Art has the feels.

Draw Diary # 3: William Blake. In his most famous poem, William Blake wondered what benevolent hand forged such a devilish creature as the tiger. Despite his own fear, the poet was drawn to its 'fearful symmetry' and evoked beauty from the ember of evil.

Draw Diary #4: Rachel Carson. In the 1960s, the Witness for Nature, writer Rachel Carson, stopped writing love letters to the ocean and turned her words on the wholly unnatural tool of human arrogance; chemical pesticide. She wrote of the damage we were doing to the world, and in turn, ourselves.  Not long after her words were published the environmental protection agency was formed. The people called the department 'the extended shadow of her writing.' To understand the impact of someone's words, watch what grows in their wake.

Draw Diary #5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent nearly twenty years of his life studying the phenomena of color in the paper thin gap between the blackness of the universe and a beam of light. In his published work, he theorized a connection between a painter’s intuition and the nature of light refraction. Scientists find little use for his so-called theory; it seemed that Goethe was merely a poet in awe of the warmth of the setting sun and the coolness of the earth's rising shadow. Still, his words and diagrams inspire with their vision of a more perfect visible world and prove the theory that truth is always close, just out of plain sight.